Char Dham: The Right Side of History

CONSIDER THIS EXCHANGE between an Uttarakhand High Court bench and the advocate general as reported by The Times of India this week. The Char Dham Yatra, which brings in much revenue and employment to the state, had been stayed because of Covid. It is also a pilgrimage that is very important to Hindus, and therefore to not allow it is politically sensitive for the government. The court had said that the rituals of temples could be livestreamed online for those who wouldn’t be able to make the pilgrimage. The advocate general argued that some priests had said the shastras didn’t permit it. To which the judges replied that India is ruled by law and not the shastras. The article added: “The court reacted sharply to the submission and said: ‘…Shastras do not control this country, what controls this country and guides us for our future is the Constitution of India and that’s where we stop. We cannot go beyond the Constitution and the laws thereunder.’”

The court had also asked for where exactly did which shastra say livestreaming was impermissible and, predictably, no such verses could be found. Relying on any shastra is the weakest argument to make in such a case because Hinduism does not have any manual like the Abrahamic religions. To reference the Quran in Pakistan is a legal argument. In India, there is no such book. Or there are thousands of such books making them all irrelevant. Take the Manusmriti. Left intellectuals and Dalit parties like Bahujan Samaj Party have long said that the Hindutva agenda is driven by the code of Manu. But try searching for any Bharatiya Janata Party or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader touting the Manusmriti openly as their Bible, and you would be hard-pressed to find one. The Manusmriti might have seeped into society in some form, but not as the legal word of God.

There were other ways to argue for the Char Dham yatra. That it is the elected government’s prerogative to decide when the lockdown must be lifted. Even if they erred earlier with the Kumbh Mela, it does not automatically follow that the state should be under perpetual lockdown. Or even that, in the balance between lockdowns and livelihoods, they had decided livelihoods trumped. They could cite the examples of countries like Singapore or Sweden which have found lockdowns impractical. And that just on the back of a second wave is precisely when such a move should be made because there would be a gap till the third wave, if at all it comes. To say that some priests have cooked up a story about a religious text having clauses about online livestreaming is hoping that the judge who is listening to it is as much in thrall of the religion as the priests who said it.

You have to be grateful that India chose not to be a nation based on religion, like many of its neighbours. Because go back sufficiently in the past even here, and it would be priests like these making up their own self-serving laws citing convenient interpretations of abstruse texts. The difference is that then most of society was hostage to it.

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Madhavankutty Pillai

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